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Topic: Media Extenders (SageTV) (Read 4526 times)

I recently read an article on SageTV which appears to be a promising product for sharing media across a home network and even the internet (with their addon). Has anyone had experience with this device or something similar and can anyone tell me more about it from first hand experience?

Wow, it definitely looks cool and has a good price, but no, I have no personal experience with it. The fact that you can exchange digital media with a wide variety portable devices, including your phone, is pretty awesome.

There are several alternatives, many of them free, depending on the functions/features you want/need... a lot of software you'd never expect also allows sharing either video or a video feed, like VLC. Check out Videohelp.com. Performance also varies with your hardware, if you're planning on using tuners etc. live from within the app.

GB-PVR is interesting, but a bit more hassle to set up. Cyberlink had a decent setup, but they're going to start charging for it. Beyond TV is more popular I think than Sage if you're going to pay. The easiest may be a downloadable, bootable, Linux disk image (forgot the name - sorry), where you just boot into an HTPC eviron.

MythTV is a very powerful and free PVR solution. I have heard a lot of positive reviews on Mythbuntu which is merely Ubuntu with MythTV included. As always you can try them from the live CD. Another free option is MediaPortal, but if you want to simply share media try Orb at orb.com. It may be audio only, but simplifymedia.com also works.

If you're going to use it for TV/PVR at all, I highly recommend SageTV above all. BeyondTV is good also, but the user base is much smaller and it is PVR-only (no video/movies/music/photos etc). For the free alternatives, GBPVR is supposed to be good. SageTV works on WHS, XP, Vista, Linux and Mac and has a very nice, easy-to-use HD extender as well. Check out the SageTV forums for more information. http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/